Surface enhanced Raman scattering research on joint synovial fluid

Osteoarthritis (OA) is considered as a chronic disease without obvious symptoms in early stage, and incurable currently. It is necessary to find an ideal method that can efficiently diagnose OA at the early stage. Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) technique is widely used for detecting the biomarkers in the biological tissues because of its competitive advantages such as high efficiency and convenience. The SERS spectra of synovial fluid (SF) from three different OA stages were collected in this study, whose results indicate that the contents of protein and proteoglycan in SF has already changed at the beginning of OA, let alone that at advanced OA stage. The frequency shifts of Raman bands suggest that modifications of the structure and components in SF at different OA stages, showing the increase in protein abundance. This study demonstrates that much more information of SF can be clearly disclosed and SERS has great potential to be an efficient tool for OA screening and diagnosis.